Man vs System

Here’s something we co-wrote with our client, enable advisory, mining planning consultants in Brisbane. They wrote the guts of the article, we just provided the top and tail for “colour”. But it lead me to read Frederick Taylor’s work again, and I can highly recommend it. Very entertaining. Here we are, a century later, trying to get clients to understand scientific marketing. Hypothesis. Test. Measure. Analyze. Adjust. Repeat.

“IN THE PAST THE MAN HAS BEEN FIRST; IN THE FUTURE THE SYSTEM MUST BE FIRST.”

So wrote Frederick Winslow Taylor, often called the father of management consulting, in the introduction to his 1911 seminal classic “The Principles Of Scientific Management”.

Taylor, born into a wealthy Quaker family, whose ancestor was one of the original Mayflower Pilgrims, turned down going to Harvard University to instead become an apprentice patternmaker and machinist. His passion for scientific management was motivated, he wrote, to help America prevent what he saw as “our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient.”